The advent of CMS (Content Management Systems) like WordPress
has revolutionized the internet, with around 5-10 websites being created every
second. If websites were earlier built only by professionals, today anyone can
create a website in a matter of minutes, with little or no coding knowledge.
This creates a lot
of opportunities, but also comes with many problems.
After an easy
5-minute install process, most people want to customize the aspect of their new
website. it is not hard to do. The market for themes and templates is
huge. But how does a website theme affect your ranking and your overall
SEO?
Table of Contents
·
Why and how do themes/templates
affect SEO?
·
Slow Speed Will Bore the User
·
Bad Structure Will Puzzle Search
Engines
·
What Makes a Theme SEO Friendly?
Why and how do themes/templates
affect SEO?
If you look at it,
WordPress users alone publish about 2 million posts a day. It now shows blogs
running every day in every language that Google has approved ads. As all the
following languages have got approval –
- Arabic
- Bengali
- Bulgarian
- Catalan
- Chinese
(simplified)
- Chinese
(traditional)
- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Filipino
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Japanese
- Kannada
- Korean
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Punjabi
- Romanian
- Russian
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Spanish
(European)
- Spanish
(Latin American)
- Swedish
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Thai
- Turkish
- Ukrainian
- Urdu
- Vietnamese
Not long ago, SEO used to be very easy. Put a
bunch of keywords somewhere, and you were all set. If that wasn’t enough, just
make a few links and you’ll definitely rank up.
Today, however,
search ranking factors have been developed much more than necessary. A lot of
people are abusing the old ways of doing SEO, so optimization had to be
optimized in order to return useful results to the users.
Design aside,
themes and templates are a huge part of a website’s structure, and they can
affect speed as well. If you don’t have these three things organized and work
well together, you are likely to see a low ranking, even if your content is
good.
Slow Speed Will Bore the User
People hate it when
they have to wait a long time for websites to load, and the truth is that most
websites load really slow. On a 3G mobile connection, the average load time of
a website is 19 seconds. It is estimated that about 50% of users give up on a
website taking more than 3 seconds to load. This will increase your bounce rate
and reduce your income.
One of the
solutions Google brought to us is Accelerated Mobile Pages. However, these
pages are still limited in many ways, and many webmasters do not want to use
them.
If a user leaves
your website or blog before it loads, they clearly had 0 experience with it.
Google notices this and tries to return the fastest loading results to its
users.
You have to help
the theme site load pages as quickly as possible to keep visitors happy.
Bad Structure Will Puzzle
Search Engines
Search engines
don’t actually see the website. Instead, they see the code behind it. If that
code isn’t structured well, and the HTML tags aren’t placed correctly, search
engines won’t be able to understand what a website is about.
For example, many
templates may use multiple H1 tags to style the text on the homepage. Good for
design, but bad for SEO. Hell, many templates can ignore headings altogether,
leaving your pages with just the title tag and a few divs. Google can still
understand the text in the div, but the important content will no longer be
highlighted.
Structure is also
closely related to speed. The code has prioritized loading the visible content.
This material is often referred to as ‘above the fold’. Even if your website
loads faster, if some elements towards the bottom of the page are loaded before
the ones at the top of the page, search engines will notice this and consider
it a bad practice.
What Makes a Theme SEO Friendly?
Let’s get things
straight: the main purpose of a theme or template is to make your website look
good. Being SEO-friendly is a side benefit. But these days there is such a
demand for this side benefit that almost every theme is now “SEO Optimized” or “SEO
Friendly”.
really. Go to and
visit Themedaddy and check out the WooCommerce
section. Open the first 3 premium themes that pop up and do a CTRL+F search for
SEO.
So what exactly
makes a theme SEO friendly?
Let me give you a
hint: having a title and meta description section built into a theme will not
make it SEO-friendly. For that, we have WordPress SEO by Yoast. Adding options
like this would only make it overwhelming.
That being said,
there are a few things to consider when determining the SEO friendliness of a
template from both Tom and Vlad as well as Cognitive SEO:
- HTML
Markup:
- Speed
& Page Size
- API
Hooks
- Responsive
Design & Images
- Structured
Data
- Content
Prioritization
If all these things
happen MAINTAIN, then automatically your blog becomes seo friendly. And that
was possible only because of a good theme. So choose a good theme and keep your
blog healthy.
Conclusion
As you can see,
themes don’t only impact the design of a website, but SEO as well. If your
theme doesn’t help with making your website quick for users and easy to read
for search engines, it will affect you in a negative way and can sabotage your
entire campaign on the long run.
Make sure you check
some of the things mentioned in this article the next time you’re searching for
a new website template.
I want to thank Tom and Vlad very much for helping us create this
resource. If any of you have questions or opinions, feel free to leave them in
the comments section.